Fishin' Jimmy's real name was James Whitcher.  He was born in the
Franconia Valley of northern New Hampshire, and his whole life had
been passed there.  He had always fished; he could not remember
when or how he learned the art.  From the days when, a tiny,
bare-legged urchin in ragged frock, he had dropped his piece of
string with its bent pin at the end into the narrow, shallow
brooklet behind his father's house, through early boyhood's season
of roaming along Gale River, wading Black Brook, rowing a leaky
boat on Streeter or Mink Pond, through youth, through manhood, on
and on into old age, his life had apparently been one long day's
fishing--an angler's holiday.  Had it been only that?  He had not
cared for books, or school, and all efforts to tie him down to
study were unavailing.  But he knew well the books of running
brooks.  No dry botanical text-book or manual could have taught him
all he now knew of plants and flowers and trees.

He did not call the yellow spatterdock Nuphar advena, but he knew
its large leaves of rich green, where the black bass or pickerel
sheltered themselves from the summer sun, and its yellow balls on
stout stems, around which his line so often twined and twisted, or
in which the hook caught, not to be jerked out till the long,
green, juicy stalk itself, topped with globe of greenish gold, came
up from its wet bed.   He knew the sedges along the bank with their
nodding tassels and stiff lance-like leaves, the feathery grasses,
the velvet moss upon the wet stones, the sea-green lichen on
boulder or tree-trunk.  There, in that corner of Echo Lake, grew
the thickest patch of pipewort, with its small, round,
grayish-white, mushroom-shaped tops on long, slender stems.  If he
had styled it Eriocaulon septangulare, would it have shown a closer
knowledge of its habits than did his careful avoidance of its
vicinity, his keeping line and flies at a safe distance, as he
muttered to himself, "Them pesky butt'ns agin!"  He knew by sight
the bur-reed of mountain ponds, with its round, prickly balls
strung like big beads on the stiff, erect stalks; the little
water-lobelia, with tiny purple blossoms, springing from the waters
of lake and pond.